Work Text:
Rattle,
rattle.
The windows shook as the storm ascended.
Izuku hadn’t been to the small, cottage house in some time, and yet the windows still sounded the same when the wind accompanied a harsh, summer storm. The same storms that accompanied every single summer of his youth, playing in them, and all sticky and sweet when those storms had vanished. Sweet, he tasted them like how the melons were when sliced by his mother’s knife; these would be the same summers that would grow cold, where the lightning strikes grew from its forked edges, millions of tiny hands...
Knocking persistently at his window when the time had come for sleep. Of course, distracted by the howls of the storm, perhaps craving for a boy with sticky hands that tasted like the ripe, yellow melon, Izuku could not, would not, sleep, until his mother had joined the knocking din herself. She would open the door to his room. When she had entered, Izuku was huddled under his covers. Only soft candlelight could lure him out from them. Only an enticing fairytale would help him fall into a quiet slumber.
As he closed his eyes gently… he could still imagine the gallop of the palace horse, at the vivid image of its rider who grew strawberries from his head. A rider who grew carnation white flowers apart from those strawberries, and both caressed his hair as it blew with the wind. Izuku's mother would finish the tale of Prince Todoroki, as he rode toward a setting sun beyond the valley, with her gentle reminders,
“ Izuku, I know there's a prince charming looking for you out there. And when he finds you, he will never let you go.”
The light would die from her candle.
A flash of lightning lights up his room, all empty now, filled with dust and mold at every dark corner. Through the round window, broken into shards that loiter on the floorboards, a strong scent of the forest glade and of the river nearby, mixed together with the raindrops that rushed inside.
When Izuku holds his hand out of that window, he only remembers the feeling of a rain from long ago. It simply passes through his translucent skin, wondering if it still remains cold.
He brushes his fingers on the windowsill. To his surprise, when he puts pressure on the rims, they hold, not letting anything through their material, treating Izuku like a palpable being. But when water was sprayed against his cheeks, his arms and bare feet, they ignored. The rain carried on their way to marking the dusty floorboards.
Izuku goes from room to room, of the old cottage house. Wiping off dust from every surface. Not feeling any surface, no blood being drained from his skin when he brushes pieces of broken glass away from windowsills. Or vases of flowers; petals that have withered and leaving the vases empty with no life growing in.
Of wooden cabinets down in the kitchen, splintered wood poking at Izuku's skin. No blood, like before, seeping through onto the wood's finishes. With every surface Izuku waves his hand against, trying to break free of his bodiless limits. There is every bit of hope, just as he had before, that his mind would catch up to his fingers. His mind was slow to process, and maybe, there was a chance 'touch' was locked in chest in which Izuku sought to find the keys to open.
Little Izuku, once bruised and muddied, running from the gardens of the schoolyard, up the stairs of the tulip- shaped home, in his tottering walk and sway. Always bound to be hurt, feeling the tears and the blood on his hands and knees. That to him, were in the same paper boat that traveled upstream. A boy who was fragile and continued to run into trouble. Like paper, he also could cut his way out. That was what defined him, as a knight.
To think that his paper boat drowned.
He arrives in the sitting room, where a cracked mirror hangs above a covered fire place. Every piece of furniture left behind had been covered in tattered tablecloths, rooted in their spots even as the wind of the storm swirled inside through the broken panes of windows.
It is an old mirror with no white coverings. It is bare, but it once was decorated with golden wild flowers... an assortment of prairie flowers that Izuku doesn't remember.
He is tall enough now to not stand on the tips of his toes. He could stand there with no sounds of the floor creaking underneath. There was the rattling of the trees that grew outside, that was a sound that filled the room. No other did.
He stopped, for a sparsity, to see his reflection; a boom of thunder casting a great glow, silhouetting him.
There was.
A ghost in the mirror.
Izuku stood, until the rain had dwindled, until the wind left the home and back to the mountains of the west.
When the forces of the storm, of the summer storm had stopped.
There was no longer a ghost in the mirror.
At certain hours, mice would creep from their holes, forged with their battered jaws. Whiskers quivering, sensing entities with no rhythmic pulses.
They gossiped within their circle of kin, Izuku imagined, about a cold shiver that did not come from the wind rushing inside the old house. It came from a white sheet of cloth, and scuffling sounds were heard when it was dragged across the tampered, rotten wood.
Mumbling ... The mumbling vanishing just like the rain had dwindled.
There was a ghost, a reminiscing ghost in this old cottage home.
They whispered about how this ghost seemed like all the rest. Having come back from their graves, restless, to find... to hold… was it love?
That was silly.
To think, this man who had died too young, wanted love. Why did he want to suffer even in the afterlife, close enough to touch the brinks of a starless void?
Why did he believe in such fairytales?
Why was he even here, revisiting this home of his early tender years, where his mother had passed in the room upstairs? The only love bounded in the folds of the picture book title, ‘ Mother and Son’ were now smoothed in sawdust from the caving roof, the bindings bitten intensely to no satisfying avail for the stomachs of the rummaging? That love was lost into memories. That love was all Izuku had in the end, all he really had held, in his sweet melon hands.
How silly. Wrapped in his blanket of patches and holes. The white fabric trailing him as a bride’s train of proposal.
Izuku had awakened, from his sleeping position among a distant meadow pasture. It took him time to realize that he could still sleep, even with... No desire to, no real need to. The emptiness could be called tired, and that comforted Izuku, because it regained a sense of control, of what he still had left.
He never dreamt.
When he had awakened, Izuku didn't need to pinch the skin of his wrist to remember that this wasn't a form of an illusion, as that wouldn't be of any help.
So not needing to think of that, he tried to remember how he had gotten in the meadow. His surroundings were bare, no trees, no deer or cattle grazing on the dry grass. Dark clouds rolled above him. Another storm. He could sleep through that one, and even if lightning stroke where he was, fatalities were of no occurrence. He would be okay.
That was it, however, he would be 'okay', not happy, not surprised. How to explain his emotions, as they, on each passing full moon, slowly disappeared. His memories were slipping from his mind as well. Somedays he would quickly rush back home, because he still remembered the trek back, because something like the place he used to live with his mother could not be forgotten. Yet.
Izuku wanted to feel the breeze blow past his head of dark, forest curls. He wanted to dream again of a galloping palace horse.
He wished and wished, and in that he found a little key scattered near his feet, that opened up a hidden box of happiness.
He wished, his arms hugging tightly his knees that touched his chest. The white cloth that covered him, like a bridal gown, bellowing in the wind.
He wished, and instead, he found that he had dreamt.
There was a white horse in the distance, it was a dot that grew bigger, with the wind sweeping its mane and that of it's rider's hair.
The rider looked like Prince Shouto Todoroki of the Musutafu Isles.
Izuku smiled. He was finally able to dream. If he recalled, he couldn't have traveled this far, in the middle of the epitome of nowhere. Even as a ghost.
As the prince got closer, Izuku saw that Shouto’s gaze seemed to go right through him. Izuku stood and quivered, drips of rain starting to fall on the ground where he stood.
If this were a dream, let him travel along Shouto, like how he did in his deep slumbers as a child.
If this, by some miracle, this be a wish granted, let Izuku feel pain and devastation. Let the horse and its rider pass through him.